Stunt Girl

Sorry, but my posts are going to be out of order. I missed a couple days, but saw this show tonight and had to go ahead and post.

I am loving soaking up all the city has to offer and tonight I went to my first reading of what I thought was going to be a play but ended up being a phenomenal musical. It is part of Manhattan Theatre Club's 7@7 Series that shows 7 new works in 7 weeks at...can you guess??? at 7. It was free to go to any of the readings, all you had to do was e-mail in. This was the first one that was taking place since I had moved to the city and I really didn't know what to expect. In fact I got the address wrong and was almost late!

The theater it was in was part of City Center and it was maybe 300 seats. It was packed. I sort of felt like an outsider because everyone knew everyone. The group was a mix of theater professionals, actors and actresses, wannabe actors and actresses, some old people and me. David Yorkey is the director and I knew him from his work on Next to Normal. The female lead was Mara Davi who played Nellie Bly, who looked really familiar and when I looked her up realized I had seen her in White Christmas and A Chorus Line. She was amazing and a perfect match for Louis Hobson who played Arthur Brisbane. I also recognized him from Next to Normal and with a quick Internet search confirmed it.

Here are some summaries:

Nellie Bly was a groundbreaking investigative journalist, an intrepid world traveler, and a captain of industry - all in a time before women had the right to vote. She's brought to tuneful life in a rollicking new musical about her hopes and heartbreak and fascinating times

The Village previously described Stunt Girl this way: "Before tabloid television, before the paparazzi, back when the news business was new...she was the original sensation. Nellie Bly was a groundbreaking investigative journalist, an intrepid world traveler, and a captain of industry — all in a time before America gave women the right to vote. Bridging the years from the turn of the twentieth century to the First World War, this remarkable woman comes to tuneful life in the rollicking new musical Stunt Girl, a fast and funny account of her life and loves, her hopes and heartbreak, and her fascinating times."

The show tells the story of a Nellie who wants to be a journalist but is told no because she is a woman. She eventually gets a job under Joseph Pulitzer and does stories that uncover the treatment of people in situations like the mental hospital for women and buying babies from the black market and uncovering the truth about the Pullman villages employees lived in. Her biggest piece was racing around the world to take less than 80 days as the book "Around the World in 80 Days" was becoming popular. Although she loves Arthur, who also works at the paper and one day hopes to be editor, she marries a rich man (who she meet working on the Pullman piece). He keep telling her, "why run when you can fly" and he told her that money would let her make the changes she wanted in the world. Nellie really wanted to work for his company and he objected until she threatened to leave. When he was tragically killed, the men in the company tried to get Nellie to sign the company over to them and they would pay her money every year, but when she realized that they had made no provisions in the contract for the treatment of the employees, she decided she would run the company herself.

Being a woman in that position during the pre-WWI era was not easy and the men did not respect Nellie. It ended up that they were not keeping the books correctly balanced the company went bankrupt, forcing Nellie to flee to Europe to try to save some money and appeal her case. It ended up that WWI began while she was in Austria and with Arthur now the publisher of the paper, he reached out to her to cover the war from inside where he couldn't get reporters. Again, her pieces were a hit with readers and eventually Nellie came back to work at the paper, penniless. Even with all the years that had passed, Arthur had never found anyone to replace his feelings for Nellie and with her back working at the paper, it might just be the new start they needed.

For this reading, the cast had rehearsed 29 hours. There is essentially no set in a reading, but just chairs lined up for the cast to sit in when it wasn't there part and music stands to hold the notebooks with the script and music. For the most part they know the show, but they do reference the material sometimes. And with such a short learning period, there were a couple parts that got a little twisted, but I fell in love with the show. The lyrics were filled with imagery. Even thought there were no sets, you could see the scenes and locations they were talking about. And the music, it was infectious. I wish I had it on my ipod right now, I would be listening to it!

It was unlike any show I had ever seen and I hope it comes to a theater, at least off-Broadway, soon.